Backup

My wish-list for backups:

  1. File naming. Rather than backup_datetime.zip, use something meaningful like emclient_backup_datetime.zip
  2. If using periodic backups, preserve more than 5 backups.

Highly recommend that the default for backup be turned on to some increment.  There are some many clients that have lost their data due to email server changes and system crashes  and they did not know or read about the backup feature.    Please upgrade your software to default to backups on  

I completely agree with you Richard. 

Also, IMAP should be set to download messages for offline use by default. If you have not enabled that, the backup is actually useless because all it contains is the message headers.

Additionally, some sort of feedback or progress would be welcome in the backup process.

I just did a backup (prior to starting the update which is pending), and all I saw was a message saying it may take a while ‘depending on the database size’.

I have no idea about the success of the process, or even if and when it completed. I remember Outlook displaying a progress dialogue box, so when it disappeared, you knew it had completed. From eM Client, nothing…

Also, the previous suggestions for some sort of incremental/file naming viability definitely 

The status is displayed in the information area. Not the percentage, but that it is happening.

And of course it is also in the log.

An update on my suggestions:

To preserve more than 5 backups, I disabled automatic backup in eM Client and then I set it up in Windows Task Scheduler. It works exactly the same as automatic backup, in that it runs whether eM Client is running or not.  The benefits of doing it that way is that you can specify a time for it to run, and it does not delete the past backups. 

… Hmmm. I guess my expectations were WAY above what eM Client delivers. I missed all that discrete notification.

I think discrete can be used to describe many features in eM Client. Some are so discrete it is virtually impossible to find them. :wink:

Forgive me for hijacking this (at least a little bit), but I’ve enabled backup (and put it in Windows task scheduler, as Gary suggested! Thanks, sir). It seems to be working OK (I haven’t hit 5 backups, yet), but my question involves once the backup is captured. I’m a pack rat; I have emails, unfortunately not complete, going back to the 1990’s. But before em Client, I could actually open a given backup and search for a particular email, in its destination folder - in text (or html) format. With em Client I have those zip files, but if I wanted to go back and, say, find a particular email and/or its attachment(s), I have no idea how to do that. I don’t want to “restore”, per se, just look inside the backup and perhaps search. If don’t find anything like that in any of the FAQs. Restore, apparently will overwrite anything I’ve stored in my active email directory since that backup, which I also don’t want to do. Help?

Hi Wesley. Unfortunately eM Client restore is an all or nothing feature, so as it replaces the existing database, you can’t restore just messages from July 2005.

eM Client does not support export to mbox files, but you can save whole folders of messages, or single messages, as eml files. Each eml file is a single email, and by default will be named with the date and subject of the message. eml files can be opened by most email clients, so the export is not locked into eM Client like the backup file is. For archiving this is a fairly decent solution.

There are two ways to do this: Menu > File > Export > Export to eml files, or by right-click and Save As.

I use the backup feature only as a safety net, in case the server(s) crash(es) on me - and that has never happened during the last 20 years. One daily backup and 3 stored backups are quite enough for me.
Other than that, I treat emails like any other document: unimportant mails are deleted, important mails are stored in my folder and file system (documents>taxes, purchases, insurance, travels, …) as eml-files or as pdf together with all other files that fall into the relevant categories. This whole folder and file system is backed up regularly on an external HD (mirrored) and archived on another external HD (complete history).

I recommend save as pdf. EmClient creates superb pdf’s, not just “screenshots” as other pdf-print drivers do (all links are preserved, text can be copied as such). Only three glitches: The “save as pdf” dialogue is hidden in the “print menue” (it would really deserve a seperate button), other than “save as eml” you have to type in the filename manually (default is message.pdf), and mails with embedded images can sometimes become unwieldy large.

I have communicated these “glitches” to pro support, and they put them on the list to consider for future versions.

If pdf works for you that is great. However, the eml format is the original raw email, so there is no need to have both. The eml format can be imported back into most email clients, whereas pdf can’t, or even if you open the eml outside of an email client, you can reply or forward it as a normal message.

I rarely (as in it would be years since the last) “print” emails, so I had no idea that PDF distillation was hidden in the Print Dialogue. This is a great tip.
While what Gary raised is a good point about the lack of ability to ‘forward’ a PDF like an email normally can, in terms of time span, a PDF does hold up better in the long term as any graphical content will be lost when the sender removes them from their server.

This makes the PDF ideal for preserving Newsletters and other outbound informational content that one would never reply to.

If the option was available on the “File / Save as…” dialogue, that would be better than just on the “File / Print” dialogue as that one takes longer to load, and I have noticed, does not remember the last path used, but seems to default back to some previously used path, which I’ll figure out in due course.

I use pdf for mails that contain links to graphic elements that have to be downloaded from the external server every time you open the eml file (subscribed newsletters e.g.). I realised that in older mails sometimes the external contents have sometimes been deleted/moved from/on the server and cannot be recovered in the eml flle, but are embedded in the pdf.

@David Green
Seems we had the same idea at the same time.

… It would appear so.

When I used Microsoft Outlook as a mail client, my Adobe Acrobat Distiller plugged into Outlook allowing me to save emails similarly at the click of a button. eM Client appears not to support this plug-in unfortunately.

"… my Adobe Acrobat Distiller plugged into Outlook "
… and the Nuance Power PDF plug-in, and the Pdf Xchange plug-in. These plug-ins were developed for the whole MS Office Suite. I  doubt that Nuance, Adobe or Tracker software would develop somtething for just an email client. Maybe emClient inc. could approach them.
That beeing said, the emails created by emClient are on par with  if not better than Outlook plus Nuance plug-in (I don’t have the other two). The only advantage of the Nuance plug-in is that it also includes all email attachments into one big pdf file, so that attachments don’t have to be saved separately.

"… my Adobe Acrobat Distiller plugged into Outlook "
… and the Nuance Power PDF plug-in, and the Pdf Xchange plug-in. These plug-ins were developed for the whole MS Office Suite. I  doubt that Nuance, Adobe or Tracker software would develop somtething for just an email client. Maybe emClient inc. could approach them.
That beeing said, the emails created by emClient are on par with  if not better than Outlook plus Nuance plug-in (I don’t have the other two). The only advantage of the Nuance plug-in is that it also includes all email attachments into one big pdf file, so that attachments don’t have to be saved separately.

i don’t know wy this post appears twice, I only hit the submit button once